Country diary: Lake District

The half-timbered youth hostel had long since vanished behind the trees as I gazed forlornly back in its direction. So no help there then from the people I had seen on the lawn across the gleaming water, and whose attention I could possibly have attracted by waving. I had trudged too far on along the lakeshore for that. And now here I was, yet another prisoner of The Screes, an eventuality that happens so often that Wasdale Mountain rescue team has acquired an inflatable boat it launches across Wastwater from the far shore – to collect those stranded (and sometimes hurt) on the massive spillway of stones and rocks that plunges from the summit slopes of Whin Rigg and Illgill Head lakewards.

Some say Ullswater's shore path from Glenridding to Howtown is the best, while others vouch for the pathway around Buttermere with its tunnel through the rocks. But surely this glorious lakeside course from Netherwasdale to Wasdale Head – despite the pickle I had landed myself in – is the finest water's edge sojourn by far. If only a level trail of flat rocks could be fashioned across the biggest scree slope by a National Trust footpath gang and so save walkers the grief it regularly causes. It was here the ancient stave I had picked up along the way as a makeshift trekking pole snapped in two, causing me to overbalance and crack my head on a boulder.

As I came to, half-stunned and with a chill wind blowing, I realised I would have to extricate myself at whatever cost. With artificial hips clicking in protest, I used the kind of painful shuffling technique not unknown to potholers to reverse every step of the way I had come across the rocks. It was only at long last I regained the sweet-scented turf and was able to regain my feet – and confront the narrow but less arduous path leading back around the lake to safety.